Uber sued over driver data breach, adding to legal woes

(Reuters) – Uber has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit over a recently disclosed data breach involving the personal information of about 50,000 drivers, the latest in a series of legal woes to hit the Internet car service.

The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco by Sasha Antman, an Uber driver in Portland, Oregon, says the company did not do enough to prevent the 2014 breach and waited too long — about five months — to disclose it.

Last month, Uber said it had discovered in September that an unknown person had gained access to a database containing the names and driver’s license numbers of thousands of drivers.

The suit, which seeks more than $5 million in damages, says Antman and other drivers “now face years of constant surveillance of their financial and personal records…and loss of rights.”

A spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Uber did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday. When the company announced the breach, it said there had been no reports of drivers’ information being misused.

While Uber has been growing in popularity and is now among the most valuable U.S. startups, it is also facing mounting legal challenges from drivers, passengers and the government.

Uber drivers in Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C. and other cities have been arrested for assaulting passengers, prompting multiple lawsuits from victims.

Uber is also facing claims by drivers who say they were illegally classified as independent contractors. A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday rejected the company’s bid to dismiss one of the suits, saying it should be decided by a jury. A ruling against Uber could force it to pay Social Security and workers’ compensation and reimburse drivers for gas and auto insurance, dramatically altering its business model.

Prosecutors in California, meanwhile, filed suit last year accusing Uber of misleading passengers by charging a “safe rides fee” to fund industry-leading background checks, while the company did little to screen applicants.

Uber has been fighting most of the claims, saying it has a rigorous background check process and that drivers are not employees of the company because they choose when to work.

Truck driver lawsuit says Anheuser-Busch InBev denied overtime

Anheuser-Busch InBev has been hit with a $5 million lawsuit by a pair of its employees who say the beer-brewing giant failed to pay its truck drivers for overtime hours and did not allow them to take meal and rest breaks.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday by drivers Charles Hill and Joe Correa in federal court in California, is a putative class action filed on behalf of other AB InBev drivers. The plaintiffs say they are still determining the potential size of the class, but it could reach 400 members based on the number of California drivers the company either currently employs or employed within the past four years.

Hill and Correa — who say they have worked for the company for more than 40 years combined — say they have “worked numerous weeks in excess of 40 hours” during their time with AB InBev and that the company has not paid them the minimum overtime rate of 1.5 times their regular pay for the extra hours they worked.

What’s more, Hill and Correa say AB InBev did not allow them to take paid meal and rest breaks, despite the company having a written policy to allow such breaks.

The drivers say they are normally paid a flat daily rate, plus an additional 10 cents per case of alcoholic beverages that they deliver to retailers throughout California. The lawsuit argues that the company “used the piece-rate payment structure specifically to eliminate any payments due for rest breaks.” In other words, they say drivers end up being discouraged from taking breaks because they are paid the same amount, based on the number of cases delivered, whether they take a break or not.

“As such,” the lawsuit argued, “it was impossible to take a break and be paid for the time.”

The plaintiffs are seeking at least $5 million in damages for the putative class action as well as additional individual damages and attorneys’ fees.

When reached for comment, an Anheuser-Busch spokesperson said the company had not been served with the lawsuit. “We are very familiar with the requirements of wage and hour laws, and take all necessary steps to ensure we are in compliance. We care about the well-being of our employees and take these allegations seriously,” the company said.

Judge rejects $324 million tech hiring settlement

A federal judge in California has rejected a $324.5 million settlement in an antitrust case targeting the hiring practices at tech giants Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe Systems.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled Friday that the “total settlement falls below the range of reasonableness” in a three-year old class action brought by a group of tech workers who alleged that the group of companies had colluded to bring down Silicon Valley salaries by agreeing to not poach each other’s workers.

The two sides agreed to settle the case in April after the companies produced emails showing executives at various companies discussing no-hire deals with their counterparts at other companies. But they denied claims that they conspired to keep down wages.

However, Koh said in her order Friday that the four companies must add more than $50 million to their settlement proposal – at least $380 million – in order to make it fair to all class members.

Google and Apple declined to comment.

Three other companies – Walt Disney’s DIS Pixar and Lucasfilm units and Intuit INTU – had also been named as defendants in the suit, but previously reached a separate settlement. Disney agreed to pay roughly $9 million while Intuit paid $11 million.

Koh wrote that she based her decision on the value of that earlier settlement, while taking into account the fact that the remaining defendants – Apple AAPL, Google GOOG, Adobe ADBEand Intel INTC – employed far more class members than the companies whose settlement was already approved.

The judge also seemed to feel that the group led by Apple and Google might be getting off easy, writing that “there is ample evidence of an overarching conspiracy.” Had the case gone to trial, the companies could have faced more than $9 billion in damages along with a mountain of bad publicity, she said. While Koh acknowledged that a trial also could have exposed holes in the class members’ case, she reached the conclusion that the companies “should, at a minimum, pay their fair share.”